HBO’s The Last Of Us could have actually gotten its live-action adaptation as a Sam Raimi two-hour or so movie. At present, it is quite hard to picture the series as a standalone movie.
So much story in the source material, being a game that requires almost 20 hours of play. Indeed, it would have been difficult to compress it all into one movie.
Before the pandemic, it could have come out as a series of movies, perhaps. But things happened and now we get to enjoy the new HBO IP every week for a specific number of episodes.
Jeffrey Pierce Talks About What-Could-Have-Been The Last Of Us
READ MORE: The Last Of Us Episode 1 Watched For 200+ Million Minutes In First Few Hours
ComicBook.com writes about one of the talents connected to possibly everything in The Last Of Us. Jeffrey Pierce, who appeared as Perry in the HBO series, is also in the video games as Tommy Miller.
He shared that he also participated in a secret script read-through for the movie.
Back then, Raimi was on board as the producer through his Ghost House Pictures banner. While he isn’t the director, his movie company has quite a lineup of titles under a similar genre as The Last Of Us.
The company was behind The Grudge, Don’t Breathe, and Slender Man. As the IP belongs to Sony, the supposed distributor of the movie was Screen Gems.
Popular titles under the company’s belt are 2022 The Invitation, 2000 Snatch, and 2011 Friends with Benefits. Other titles under the horror and thriller genre are 2018 Searching, 2010 Legion and 2005 Hostel.
The production also had Neil Druckmann, the creative mind of the video game as well as the co-creator of the currently ongoing series. At the time, Druckmann was also to pen the script.
In a recent talk with EW, Pierce shared:
As good as it was, it was never gonna be a great movie. In a two-hour runtime, how are you gonna tell 14, 17 hours of story? Then I think that there was some conversation about it maybe being an animation motion-capture movie series at some point, and that seemed like a good idea, but we’ve been down that road.
This was a very crucial point.
The Last Of Us Could Have Been An Animated MoCap Movie Series
Credit: HBO Max
READ MORE: The Last Of Us Season 2 Has Been Renewed By HBO
Imagine how that would have looked? How much of the source’s imagery would have been used for the movie? Years ago would have been too early for another zombie apocalypse movie.
The current television series’ timing couldn’t have been better as well. With other zombie drama series taking their seemingly final steps because the main story series ended last year, there is now room for a good zombie drama-action-thriller.
Also, the presence of award-winning Chernobyl writer Craig Mazin could have been the missing piece for the story to develop significantly. Pierce said:
The second that I heard that Neil and Craig had lunch together — I had just watched Chernobyl in a hotel room in Vancouver or something and was floored by this historical event — I knew that the two of them were gonna make something just about perfect.
According to Nielsen, it really is just about perfect. The HBO series is outperforming its own ratings every week. After every episode, its following on social media is just increasing.
This has pleased long-time video gamers and new audiences, it brings together groups with slightly different entertainment preferences. And everyone is just enjoying the series so far.
The Last Of Us is available on HBO and HBO Max with five currently released episodes. A new episode arrives this Sunday.
What would have happened if Sam Raimi truly got his chance at producing the movie? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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